Rustic Temple, Château of Ermeonville, ca. 1770

~FROM the mid eighteenth century on, Historicism pervaded architecture as thoroughly as it had the other arts. In fact, this new viewpoint has usually been pointed out more clearly in histories of architectureFor English-speaking readers the term has become familiar...

Around 1750, a young French Jesuit priest began writing a relatively short critique of contemporary architecture, offering his views on how the situation might be reformed. To argue his position, which was decidedly outside the mainstream and had no professional credentials for support, he made use of a mimetic theory of representation, most of the elements of which had been noted before, but which as a whole had never previously been articulated with quite the same sense of purpose or conviction. Marc-Antoine Laugier’s (1713–1769) Essai sur...